Murder in Dubrovnik

  Murder in Dubrovnik

  Zoran Basich

  For Marina, Luka and Domenic

  Copyright © 2019 by Zoran Basich

  All rights reserved

  Chapter 1

  Marko Bell spent a month working his contacts in the biker underground. All that work had brought him to a dirty alley in the Tenderloin district.

  Two hooded figures appeared. One stood at the mouth of the alley and the other approached Marko.

  “Give me the money,” the guy said.

  “Give me the number first.”

  The guy had a biker’s bandanna around the lower part of his face and sunglasses on under his hood. Marko could tell he was a white male, with a slight twang to his voice, probably rural Northern California, one of those heavily forested towns near the Oregon border that supplied the state with a steady stream of cheap crank and menaces to society.

  Marko watched the guy do a calculation in his head. He was none too smart and Marko could see the synapses sluggishly firing. If I give him the number, he’ll have the number but I won’t have the money.

  Then Marko saw the guy smile, because he had just worked out the esssential geometry of the situation and remembered Marko was trapped in the alley and wasn’t likely to get out.

  Marko knew it too but didn’t care. If things went bad right now, it was just as good as any other way to go.

  The guy held out a slip of paper.

  Marko took it and looked at the number. There was a password written on the paper too. An industrial rock band from the nineties. Marko mentally filed the fact away. Pure habit. It was a clue he’d never need.

  “How do I know it’s legit?”

  “You don’t. Now give me the fucking money.”

  Marko handed him an envelope stuffed with $5,000 in hundred-dollar bills. The guy took a rough count, turned and walked out of the alley.

  Once they were gone Marko looked at the number again.

  Now all it would take was a phone call.

  No time like the present, Marko thought.

  He pulled out his cell phone and made the call.

  He didn’t expect anyone to answer, but someone did.

  A nondescript voice. Male, maybe 40, but it was hard to tell. Maybe white.

  “Hello?”

  “Skinny Puppy told me to call you.”

  Okay.

  “You want a description?”

  Yeah. The guy’s voice flat, almost uninterested. It was his job.

  Marko looked at his dirty reflection in the window of a grimy Vietnamese restaurant kitchen.

  “White male, 32 years old. Six foot one, 190 pounds. Short brown hair, no facial hair.”

  The guy scribbling it down. Marko couldn’t hear him but he knew he was doing that. Rolling over in bed to grab a pen, something like that.

  Name and address?

  Marko gave it to him and he listened to the guy scribble it down.

  Alright. Got it.

  “When?”

  What? The guy annoyed, wanting to go back to sleep.

  “When does it happen?’

  The guy paused. Marko imagined him looking at the clock. Maybe thinking about his schedule for the next couple days. A professional, doing his job.

  Not tomorrow or the next day. Probably the one after.

  The guy hung up.

  Marko left the alley, got in his car and drove to his apartment in the Mission. He got in bed. Two more sleeps, he thought.

  It would all be over.

  Dubrovnik and 1991 would be over. Amanda would be over. La Traviata would be over. Walter Roark would be over.

  He could handle any one of those. He had, in fact, for a long time. But too much had piled up. He was suffocating and knew it was irreversible. He was tired of fighting it. He wanted it to end. Whoever would have cared was already gone.

  Donna would be over. He finally wanted it to be over.

  Two more sleeps.

  He fell asleep peacefully, for the first time in years.

  ***

  Karen Yancey wanted to see him.

  She was signing some papers on her desk when Marko walked in.

  “Been a while,” she said, looking up.

  “Three months.”

  “You good?”

  Marko thought about how to answer that. No. I’m not good at all.

  But just one more sleep now. The idea brought him relief.

  He sat down, looked around her office. It wasn’t fancy but it looked like a place where work got down.

  “You see Shake?”

  “Not in a while,” she said with a note of regret. “Not since he quit. We’ve been meaning to get together. He seems content.”

  “How’s the job?”

  She looked around her desk at the piles of paper.

  “It’s more administrative than I expected.”

  “I don’t know. Looks pretty glamorous.”

  She laughed.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” she said.

  “Which one?”

  “About how you’re doing.”

  “I’m perfectly okay. I’m fantastic. I whistle a happy tune every morning. I go to sleep with a smile on my face. I exude gratitude and look for the best in strangers. I choose joy.”

  He really did feel better now that it was almost over. It was strange.

  She laughed again. “You’re not a ‘choose joy’ type of guy, Marko.”

  “You never know.”

  “You’re probably wondering why I called you.”

  “It crossed my mind.”

  They hadn’t spoken since the night Karen shot Jim Deegan and Marko burst into Emerson Banks’ office just as Banks was pulling the trigger. After that there was a lot of police and interviews and media. Days of chaos. But he and Karen hadn’t spoken.

  Marko felt a glimmer of shame that he was contracting out his suicide while The Eagle handled it himself. But the shame would all be over soon, too.

  “I’ve got a rich lawyer who’s missing in Europe,” Karen said. Always ambitious, always looking for the next thing.

  “What’s that got to do with me?”

  “I want you to take the case.”

  “I decline.”

  “You what?”

  “I decline.”

  She pushed her paperwork to the side and stared at him. Karen had worked things out beautifully for herself after the Banks thing. She was rising quickly and her name was popping up as the logical candidate for police chief, once Cuddy moved on to whatever he was moving on to.

  The rich lawyer was probably from a prominent Pacific Heights family Karen badly wanted to impress. Getting appointed police chief required influential supporters. Karen had some angle, as usual.

  “What are you trying to say to me?”

  “I’m saying I’m not doing it,” Marko said.

  “What makes you think you can decline a case?”

  “Because this is off-the-books. Outside of our jurisdiction. A political favor of some kind. You’re coming to me because you trust me and you know I won’t use it against you or make you look bad. And it’s true, I won’t. But I’m not doing it.”

  She looked sad.

  Marko laughed. He didn’t care anymore, he truly didn’t. “Don’t tell me you’re disappointed.”

  “I thought you owed me one. Maybe I was wrong.”

  Marko thought the same thing. What would have happened if Karen hadn’t grabbed hold of the Fielding case and put it together with La Traviata? If she hadn’t put her own life on the line and believed in Marko? He’d probably be in jail or dead.

  So there was that.

  “I do owe you one. But not this one.”

  He felt a glimmer of regret that he’d never
repay her. But that regret, that was all ending, too. God he felt good.

  She kept staring at him. “Okay,” she said, nodding. “No problem, Marko. I thought you were right for it, so I asked. My bad.”

  Marko got up to leave. He felt the control that came with not caring. It gave him power.

  He turned just as he reached the door.

  He was curious.

  “So who’s missing anyway?”

  Karen looked up. She knew he’d ask. She had counted on it.

  “Amanda Murphy,” she said, and went back to her paperwork.

  He sat back down.

  “Where is she?”

  She smiled.

  “Last seen in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Where you’re from. I didn’t know that until this afternoon, when I got a call from her mother, Sylvia Pemberton. You’re right, Marko. I’m doing this for reasons that aren’t entirely by the book, and I’m doing it as a favor to Sylvia, and I trust you to be discreet about it.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Forty eight hours,” Karen said. “That’s what I need from you. Find her, don’t find her, I honestly couldn’t care less. Just pay a visit and make sure the local cops are doing their job. Check in with the mayor, the U.S. ambassador. That’s it. There’s a flight leaving tonight at 9:55. You’ll be back in 48 hours.”

  Marko considered sticking to his guns and refusing the assignment, but he knew he was helpless.

  It was Amanda.

  Missing.

  In Dubrovnik.

  He felt the vision coming. He did nothing to try to stop it. The familiar roaring in his ears grew in intensity and he gripped the armrest to brace himself until it passed.

  The men in a ragged semi-circle in his family’s living room.

  Father on his knees before them.

  His voice, quiet and pleading.

  Don’t hurt the boy.

  “Marko, are you okay?”

  His eyes regained focus and he saw Karen staring at him, looking concerned.

  “Fine,” he said, and walked out.

  Chapter 2

  The kiosk girl unbundled the newspapers in the dark. Then she put out the candy and gum. Her heart was beating loud.

  He couldn’t hear that, could he?

  The night was still and the moon was empty and she had the feeling any sound she made carried across the docks and out to the sea. Even her terrified heartbeat.

  The long minutes until the fishermen were due to arrive felt like an eternity. She felt a powerful urge to leave the kiosk, scramble up the hillside, cut through the fig orchards and go back home, but she needed this job – her mother was very sick and there was no money after her father left.

  She took a deep breath, silently crossed herself and flipped on the lights.

  Three hundred yards away, in the Adriatic Sea, a man standing in the rotting bow of an old fishing boat called the Patriot saw the fiberglass shack light up. He trained his high-powered binoculars on the kiosk and saw the girl. He sensed in her nervous manner that she felt vulnerable in the light. That meant she had spotted him.

  Clever girl, he thought to himself. It pleased him.

  She wore her work uniform, the same red vest she had worn the previous two days. He decided that she came from one of the nearby villages — he had seen her walking to work along the coastal highway, illuminated by sporadic streetlights. No buses ran at that hour, and even if they did, nobody would travel more than a few miles for a job like hers. She was a local girl.

  He watched the local fishermen begin arriving on the docks. They lined up to buy cigarettes and coffee and make small talk but they didn’t linger long. Once their brisk morning trade was done they revved up their small motors and puttered by in a modest flotilla, leaving the docks dead quiet again. The sky began to lighten and the first of the cicadas began chuffing away on the hillside.

  When the man was sure all the boats were out, he motored the Patriot into the inlet and tied up at the far end of the harbor. He knew the girl would occupy herself by doing crossword puzzles and looking at her phone until the fishermen returned. For the next few hours she would be alone in the small harbor.

  He put on the jute hood. It had two eyeholes, a nose hole and a mouth hole, all crudely cut out of a gunnysack. Frayed threads blurred the edges of his vision and stuck to the moist corners of his lips. As he approached the kiosk he could hear rustling and ringing sounds as the girl set up the cash register. The fresh minty scent of gum drifted toward him and he heard small popping sounds. He was eager to get a good look at her – he imagined her mouth moving and her tongue forming tiny pink bubbles that sounded like little firecrackers when she bit down.

  When he was close enough he stood still and watched her. From afar she had seemed rosy-cheeked and pretty. Up close she was older than he thought, perhaps seventeen, and she wore too much makeup for his liking.

  He reached the front of the kiosk. It was just the two of them.

  She saw him and stopped snapping her gum.

  The chorus of sun-roused cicadas grew louder, a wave of sound coming from the pine trees that encircled the harbor. He loved this harbor, the stillness of it, how secluded it was. He sometimes imagined all the thousands of miles stretching behind the trees, through the Croatian hinterlands, through Serbia and Romania and Ukraine and into Russia, and if one went far enough he supposed Siberia waited, though he had never been that far.

  “Please don’t hurt me.”

  She sounded scared. He considered taking off his hood but he was sure she would not react well. Something about the kiosk girl — the way she snapped her minty gum, her sleepy trek every morning in the dark — told him she would not spare his feelings, no matter how scared she was. She might even spit at him. That had happened before. He could hear his own breathing inside the gunnysack.

  She stepped toward the rear of the kiosk, away from him, and pulled out her cell phone.

  “Put that away,” he said, leaning into the shack.

  Her hands were shaking and she had trouble pushing the right buttons.

  “I’ll scream if you get any closer.”

  He reached across the bundles of newspapers spread across the front counter and grabbed her wrist. Her phone clattered to the floor. She screamed and her eyes widened in fear.

  “You should have listened to me,” he said.

  A far-off sound disrupted the quiet in the harbor.

  Boat engines, getting closer.

  He let go of her wrist and turned to look out at the sea, but he didn’t see any boats.

  “I told them about you,” she said, her voice shaking but no longer fearful as the engines got louder. “When the sun comes up it glints off your binoculars.”

  He saw three fishing boats, their engines revving hard and throwing off trails of whitewater in their wake. Somehow she had summoned them by phone with her swift taps.

  Now they were too close for him to escape the harbor, he realized with a sinking in his chest.

  The three boats tied up and six fishermen emerged. They held wooden clubs and gaffing hooks. When they reached the kiosk they formed a semi-circle around him. One of the younger ones advanced and clubbed him across the jaw, knocking him to the gravel as the men closed in. Another fisherman went through his pockets.

  “Fifteen kuna,” the fisherman said, holding up three coins. “And this.”

  He held up a small piece of waxy paper, ringed with small holes. The fisherman knit his thick brow as he stared at it, then crumpled it in his hand.

  The oldest fisherman was gaunt and had a bushy silver mustache. The other men seemed to defer to him.

  “Why did you come here today?” the older fisherman demanded.

  He said nothing, his breathing heavy under the hood.

  “Take it off,” said the fisherman who had clubbed him, a barrel-chested boy with cheeks ruddy from the morning chill.

  When he didn’t move, the fisherman grabbed him roughly by his denim shirt, sat him up in the grav
el and pulled off his hood.

  One of the men made a retching sound. Others spit, or grunted in disgust and looked away. The ruddy-cheeked fisherman kicked the man hard in the ribs. They began to advance and the man braced for more blows, for the clubs and the hooks to do their work.

  “Stop,” the old fisherman said.

  He stepped forward, into the tight circle of men with their weapons. He squatted down and took a long look at the man’s face. “Where are you from?”

  A red string of bloody saliva trickled from the man’s mouth onto his shirt. “Near Dubrovnik,” he said.

  “What were you thinking, coming here and scaring the girl like that?”

  “I just wanted newspapers. I don’t like people to see me. That’s why I waited for all of you to leave. I meant her no harm.”

  One of the other fishermen, thickly built and bearded, stepped forward and gestured toward his mates. “He’s playing us for fools. Who knows what he had in mind? Remember those kids, in the spring? They said it was an old man tried to get them onto his boat. Tall, just like this one. They never caught him.”

  A murmur rose up and the men drew closer, tightening the circle until the man felt he was at the bottom of a well, a small circle of light high above.

  “No,” the older fisherman said quietly, talking to the fishermen but keeping his eyes fixed on the left side of the man’s face. “This happened to him in 1991. Didn’t it?”

  The man nodded.

  The girl yelled from the kiosk, her voice still shaky. “Aren’t you going to do something? He was spying on me for two days.”

  The man knew they were weighing something and that he still had a chance to convince them. A desperate feeling rose up in him. He was surprised to realize it was a desire to stay alive. “I was just looking for a quiet place to buy my newspapers,” he said, struggling to speak with his mouth full of blood. “I try to avoid people.”

  The old fisherman rose from his crouch and the group widened its circle to give him room. “This man is a war hero. Let him buy his newspapers and be on his way.”

  For a minute no one moved. Then the fisherman who had gone through the man’s pockets handed the coins to the kiosk girl. She emerged from the kiosk with several newspapers, which she dropped in the gravel.